Latest adoption figures show another slowdown in rollout pace

This is according to the latest figures for April from AdDuplex, which show that the October 2018 Update is now running on 29.3% of PCs (as measured by the firm’s ads which are displayed in Microsoft Store apps, with a sample size in excess of 100,000).

Compare that to March, when the October 2018 Update was on 26.4%, and you can see that the increase in adoption didn’t quite reach 3%. From February to March, there was a 5.2% increase in adoption of the upgrade, and in January, we witnessed more of a leap of 8.8%.

So as you can see, as the months have rolled on since the start of 2019, the pace of adoption has gradually slowed to the level where it’s back to a crawl, and the speed it was moving at last year (when the update was famously paused for the best part of a month, which hardly helped things).

As ever, we have to bear in mind this is just one set of sample statistics, so not a definitive overview by any means, but it certainly paints a rather dire picture of things for Microsoft, considering that the October 2018 Update still hasn’t even reached 30% of PCs.

And with the May 2019 Update taking the baton later next month, the October 2018 Update is effectively about to run out of road.

Missing by a mile

Previously, AdDuplex had speculated that the October 2018 Update wouldn’t reach half of PCs before the next upgrade came out, and folks began to jump directly to that instead. However, it seems that the October offering will barely reach a third of Windows 10 machines, never mind half.

Speaking of the May 2019 Update, that’s already on 0.8% of PCs, which represents the ranks of testers trying out the update before its official release (which is expected to happen later in May).

Microsoft is taking its time with the May 2019 Update to ensure that it gets things right, and avoids any nasty gremlins in the works of the sort we witnessed with the halting of the October 2018 Update (namely a scary file deletion flaw).

And for starters that means curing the worrying stumbling block that the May 2019 Update has hit with USB drives, whereby drive letters – including internal system drives – can be reassigned with potential nasty complications.